Morning journal and courier., 1887-03-10
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lBurdette Tn the Brooklyn Eagle
 It is indeed pleasant to settle down to housekeeping again after few years of life in every sort of hostelry, from an open face camp in the Adirondacks to a New York bo- tel. There are so many pleasant surprises in store for one when one takes one's Lares and Penates with all the appurtenances there unto appertaining from the dark solitude of the gloomy storeroom in which they have passed few years in sentiment and rehec- tion. You think of so many more things than you say you unpack the barrel of hammered china and crackle ware Some of our fragile ware 1 hammered myself, some the truckman hammered and some was ham mered when the cask fell down the elevator well at the store room. l am fair to mid ding light weight packer, but I not a genius. Consequently it never occurred to me, when I packed a bale of pressed hay around one tumbler. to pack against the contingency of a fall of SIX stories. But then I never stored before and I knew not the ways of the storage warehouse. 1 do now. If ever l store again-but-excuse these tears. 1 have now nothing to store. Nothing save only one stove leg. And it doesn't belong to me. It got mixed up with my things in the warehouse But it is whole; hasn't crack or flaw in it and so 1 will keep it. I have no earthly use for it, but it does my soul good to see something whole about the new house beside the ones I made in the wall hunting for hidden seantling with a hammer and picture nail. I found a scant- ling once. Probed for it with gimlet until got hold of it. Then I went into the next room for a hammer and a picture nail. When I came back if somebody hadn't moved that scantling I am a heathen from Nowgong I haven't time to chase scant- ling ali around a house. So drove the nail into a lath and hung the picture. 1 am now one picture short in that room, but I plas- tered the hole in the wall so neatly you can t see where it happened.
 So'many little things turn up as you un- cover your long hidden treasures 1 hear my sister weeping in the next room over one of them now. She brings her piteous face into my lair and says in the tone of wo- man who is weary of life, 1T have found an- other moth" I say, "Why, you found six yesterday; what do you want with another!' She goes away wringing her hands. I sup pose she found this one to bring the count up to the perfect number. Why do women God bless them-go about hunting for things they don't want to find?
 Only the other day while I was writing an "Ode to Washington" and was trying to think of rhyme for hatchet, she called me down stairs. She said 1T believe there is something alive in that barrel" 1 said in my native language, which always comes back to me in moments of anger. "A wv w-w?' The idiom is untranslatabie. Only men who have used it know what it means; to all others it is the unknoWable. I stood on my head in that barrel to grasp at the straw and crush her idle fears, and may l never see the penitentiary if a procession of starveling mice didn't stampede up my back and jump off my waving legs. I did not come out of that barrel so hastily as you might suppose. My intention was to come out rather abruptly, but 1 checked it. A nail foot long, which ran into my back eighteen inches, helped me to pause. They had to knock the other head of the barrel il | to let me crawl through that way. am now teetotaller, but had nail that day tha for staying qualities beat any sfpeat Ticker that ever introduced fallen man to the iume
 janbs.